I live with my parents. Help take care of my disabled dad, her husband. She’s furloughed and anxious about whether she’ll be able to buy our house from the landlord, and just lost her mom, but she’s also being the exact same person she was before that. Today it’s showing zero compassion for my mental health and my chronic pain condition. I don’t pay them money. I’m disabled and haven't been able to get disability income yet. I "pay" them in cleaning around the house and being a 24:7 nursemaid for my dad and their two old cats. He doesn’t wake her up in the middle of the night to fix him an alka seltzer, or hand him his blanket and pillow that are two feet from his fingertips, but he hurts too badly to reach them. That’s me.

She insists that part of my “paying rent” is that I have to wash dishes. But she always very pointedly says “I wash my dishes, and I put them away.” Which is her disgustingly passive aggressive way of telling me it’s MY job to take care of him. This has always been my chore when I live with them, and I have always been absolutely nauseated at washing dishes. I have OCD. I hate having KY hands in hot water like you do to wash them. It's hot soapy garbage water. I will instantly retch if I touch soggy food. They use a soap brush to wash dishes so I don't have to stay in a sinful of water; if I get soap on my hands I have to immediately rinse them clean because I can’t stand the sensation of it just sitting there.

And when it comes to putting them away, which she’s insistent upon, there is a cabinet of cookie sheets, in which she has every piece of bakeware in the whole house save for three small casserole dishes. It’s so difficult to separate the layers because the stack is so heavy, but they have to go back exactly as she wants them, which changes occasionally. By the time I’ve wrestled them apart and jammed the freshly clean stuff in its proper place, my back hurts a lot. But her new one today was that she’s not going to do my job, that “you’d better figure it out, or not use them.” I managed to get to my room before I started to cry, but I did. In the last nine months, thanks to some good therapy and really feeling finally validated, I've found myself actually doing a lot of mourning of the relationship I have always wanted with her. The relationship some of my friends had and have with their mothers. The relationship I genuinely still put energy into in the hopes it someday still exists. I will still be kind and the better person I know I am (compared to whom I once was, not whom she is, thooouuugghhh...) but I think I am finally in the process of letting it go. I also cried for the loss of my dad's mom, who was definitely a more influential mother figure and definitely a more compassionate one--I was her first grandkid, one of two, and she loved my brother fiercely, but we had a special relationship. She's been gone since May 23rd of 2011, but spring is always hard, she loved mushroom hunting and it's so everywhere in my radar right now, on top of mothers day.

I guess I’m gonna rely on spaghetti o’s for a while, steer clear of the oven, until I get a couple of cookie sheets of my own and see how long it takes before she finds a reason to get mad at me over THEM. I’ll use them, wash them, and store them in my room like I’m already made to do with canned and dry goods. If I don’t use their cookie sheets, and they show up in the sink or drainer, I can refer back to a screenshot of a note in my phone, with a direct quote of what she said while it’s fresh in my memory, so it can’t be disputed. At that point my dad often tries to mediate and does stand up for me sometimes, (though they both think I’m terrible most of the time, he’s far more my friend than she is. I can’t help but be a daddy’s girl — weird psych result of his physical abuse as I grew up. Yes, I’m in therapy lol.)

The other day I finally told him “I mean you know I love mom, she’s my mom. But I don’t LIKE her.” And he didn’t become furious like he definitely would have a handful of years ago. Gotta find those silver linings. I can usually talk to him candidly and like adults when she isn’t around. I’m really grateful for that today, of all days. I don’t get to have a good relationship with my mom, and the one I have with him is tumultuous. But it’s also often far better than it ever had been.

To everyone who has lost a mother, if you cared that you did, I’m sorry for your loss. If you didn’t, I’m grateful for your freedom. 💚

TL;DR my mom's been particularly nasty and uncaring today, and I just don't like her, but at least the relationship I have with my dad is improving. I miss his mom like crazy and mothers day blows, but I have to be grateful for what I DO have. I AM grateful.